In the coming year, open-source proponents anticipate that the worlds of containers, container orchestration and the dynamic infrastructure services underneath will all start to merge and work together.

“We have two powerful platforms [OpenStack and OpenShift] to solve problems, and we’ve moving them closer and closer together,” said Paul Cormier (pictured, right), president of products and technology, Red Hat Software, at Red Hat Inc.

Cormier and Matt Hicks (pictured, left), president of software engineering, OpenShift, at Red Hat, joined host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the OpenStack Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed convergence in an open-source world, telco’s retooling efforts and a user case in the education field. (* Disclosure below.)

Ease and flexibility, no matter the implementation

Regarding the different industries where OpenStack — an open-source software platform for cloud computing — is used, Cormier zeroed in on two: telcos and education.

Telcos typically retool every 10-12 years, and the industry recently entered an industry-retooling phase, Cormier stated. Telcos will be coming out of a world where the stack — all away from hardware, through OS networking, and up to applications — has been on one per application.

Now, they will switch to a new world of application-centric stacks, where the infrastructure underneath applications will scale dynamically. “For us, the telco space is on fire with OpenStack,” Cormier said.

In education, Red Hat and OpenStack are powering Massachusetts Open Cloud, an initiative for researchers across Massachusetts learning facilities. For the researchers, it’s a way to put together a big infrastructure; for Red Hat, it’s a way to have an enterprise lab for its products.

“They run the environment on three users,” Hicks said, which demonstrates how stable and consumable the technology is today.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of OpenStack Summit 2017 Boston. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this OpenStack Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE